Dark nosed lions are fair game, researchers say

Big game hunters should set their sights on lions with dark noses so as to do the least damage to numbers of the king of beasts, scientists say.

Male lions are born with pale tips to their noses which get steadily more freckled as they age, to the point where at five-years-old they are about half black.

Observation of lions in Tanzania's Serengeti and Ngorongoro reserves coincided with a study showing that removing males over the age of five from individual prides resulted in the least risk to the long term survival of the group.

"Shooting too many young males leads to an inevitable decline in population size, whereas quota size is irrelevant when hunting is restricted to older males," the team from the University of Minnesota wrote in the science journal Nature.

The strategy of only shooting males of five or more years old had the added bonus that in the long run there would actually be more males in the lion population to hunt," they said.

You have no doubt been hearing a lot about the Paris Agreement and know that it pertains to climate change, but are too embarrassed at this stage to ask for an overall explanation of what it's all about.